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Debian isn't showing all my ram

So you just got your brand new SoftLayer Debian server, you login for the first time and get to work configuring it the way that you need it to be to serve your customers. But there's a problem; you ordered your system with 4 GB of RAM but you are only able to see 2. Well this may just be an issue with the default Debian kernel.

Section 1: Checking available RAM

First thing's first, how much RAM does your system believe that it has available?

This should list the sticks of RAM that are actually installed to the system. Looks like 4 separate sticks of 1 GB RAM installed to me. Let's move on to solving this problem.

Section 2: The Bigmem Kernel

Due to some optimizations made at the kernel level of Linux there are a few different "maximum memory" specifications that are set to achieve maximum performance, but you are probably most concerned about getting to your RAM immediately, so let's get to that. The first thing that you need to do is install the "bigmem" kernel package if it is not already installed. Our default installations of Debian come with this installed so you should not need to do this, but just in case take the following steps.

Check to see if the kernel is already installed. If something like linux-image-2.6-686-bigmem shows up here, then skip down to Section 3 because you're all set